Isight

There's never been a better time to switch to iPhone. Whether you're tempted for yourself or looking to help the Android user in your life, the all-new, all-better iPhone 6 and iPhone-6-plus make the move more compelling than ever — especially with their incredible everyday cameras.

Though the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus cameras may appear to be the same 8-megapixel camera that has appeared on Apple's smartphones for several years in a row now, these cameras are getting major internal upgrades to improve your picture-taking. The 8-megapixel iSight camera gets a whole new sensor that allows for better autofocus and advanced noise reduction. The iPhone 6 Plus camera also adds OIS, a feature many iPhone users have been asking for for years.

A decade ago I spent thousands of dollars and spent months shooting, developing, and editing photos for a book I was working on. It was an incredibly expensive, incomprehensibly wasteful process. Now I get not only less expensive but better photos with the iPhone 5s and apps in my pocket. and that's nothing compared to what Robin Jasmer is getting with his iPhone 5 and Photoshop Express:

The iPhone 5 comes equipped with an 8 megapixel rear iSight camera. It's a great camera, as long as it's functioning properly. However, if you're experiencing issues with your rear camera and you're out of warranty, replacing it yourself could be a lot cheaper than a new iPhone. Symptoms could include a black screen, hazing in images, spots showing up in photos, or lines through photos. If any of these problems sound like something you've experienced, it may be time to DIY replace your camera.

With the iPhone 6, presumably due sometime this fall, Apple will no doubt continue its focus on photography and on making the best "everyday" cameras in the business. There are several ways to do that. You can have a big piece of glass that takes up a lot of space but captures an incredible amount of information. You can have an amazing image signal processor (ISP) that takes what information is captured and makes incredible use of it. You can have killer software that takes the bits, analyzes and processes the pixels out of them, and creates incredible results. And you can have fantastic cloud services that take whatever comes out of the phone and applies incredible server-side power to it. In other words, in the glass, in the chip, in the apps, in the cloud. Nokia and its 41-megapixel Carl Zeiss lenses, Apple and their A-series processors, Samsung and their bevy of features, and Google and their auto-awesome servers are examples of all three approaches. So where can Apple and the iPhone 6 go next?

Two researchers at Johns Hopkins University published a paper that has recently been widely reported throughout the Mac blogosphere. They claim to have been able to hack the webcam on older MacBook and iMac computers so the camera worked without activating the green LED. Don't tape over your webcam yet, though. I've had a look over the paper, and it's not as bad as you might think.

The iSight camera in the Retina mini remains unchanged from last year's original. It's still the same 5 megapixel, backside illuminated (BSI), five-element, hybrid IR file red, and f/2.4 aperture. What has changed is the Apple A7 processor inside, and the image signal processor (ISP) inside it. That's 2 generations ahead in terms of imaging technology, which includes auto white balance, focus, exposure, face-detection, and more. In daylight, when the sun is flooding it with photons, there won't be much if any difference. When it comes to low-light, however, the A7 ISP pulls a little more detail out of the darkness, same as the iPad Air, but certainly nowhere near as good as the superior optics in the iPhone 5s. So the question becomes, how good - or bad - is it?

Apple is reportedly in the final stages of acquiring PrimeSense - the Israeli company whose sensor technology was used by Microsoft to create the original Kinect for Xbox 360 - for roughly $280 million. According to Calcalist (via Google Translate):

While the iPad Air now has the same, improved front-facing FaceTime HD camera as the iPhone 5s - and every other 2013 iOS device - its rear-facing iSight camera remains very much unchanged from the iPad 4 and original iPad mini. What has changed however is the software and hardware that power it. With iOS 7 and the very same Apple A7 found in the iPhone 5s - and the very same image signal processor (ISP) - the iPad Air could see an overall boost in quality anyway. To measure how it stacks up, we put the 5 megapixel iPad Air camera up against the 8 megapixel camera, not see if it would win - it doesn't have a chance - but to see how close it can come!

The iPhone 5s once again shows Apple's focus on cameras, bringing several improvements to the 8 megapixel iSight camera on the back. These include a dual LED white/yellow flash called True Tone, a larger f/2.2 aperture, bigger 1.5mm pixel sensor, and, of course, the next generation image signal processor (ISP) in the new Apple A7 chipset. What does this mean for overall, every day photo quality? What does it mean for skin tones and low-light? What does it mean for motion and dynamic range? And how does it compare to the also just-launched iPhone 5c and last year's similarly equipped iPhone 5? Let's take a look!